The print media everywhere in the world is under siege from the electronic surge that is just as exciting and just as it is difficult to cope with considering the frantic pace of its development. According to many media pundits, newspapers as we have known them for centuries, will no longer be available, possibly even in the foreseeable future as new generations of readers gradually prefer to catch up with the news on their PCs, laptops and mobile phones. Even traditional radio and television are considered certain future victims unless they willingly choose to converge and become part of this whole, whirlwind process of change.
Some of us may still not have noticed, but it is already happening. Do you ever see young men and women actually buying a newspaper when you visit your newsagent every morning? If you do, it must be a very rare occurrence. Only on Sundays, when the papers and their glitzy magazines are thrown onto the family table for general consumption, are youngsters really tempted to take a look. A very quick look, alas, usually at the pictures, the fashion adverts, possibly the football results and hey, ma, da, I’ll be back for lunch. No chips, please.
Newspapers were an object of wonderment for us. Most of us used to buy the daily paper for our fathers, devouring its contents on our way back from the newsagent. In my case, I must have unknowingly committed myriad mortal sins delivering the then Church-condemned Il-Helsien to my dad in the early 1960s. A name in print, even if that happened to be in one of the Law Court reports, was a name to remember and to cherish. Only clever people wrote or were mentioned in newspapers and our sheer sense of amazement persisted throughout, from the front page to the sports pages.
For those few of us who got the bug at an early stage, it became an obsession. I remember us producing hand-written newspapers for our Subbuteo table-soccer club, the local Museum branch and, later in life, the “controversial” new mixed youth club we used to attend much to the chagrin of the local parish priest. With a background like that, one could hardly expect us to even think of ever doing without a newspaper every single day of the week. Also quite tellingly, we still miss it on Christmas Day and Good Friday.
Having eventually found myself, as if by some kind of inner magic, in the working world of newspapers as a wordmonger myself, my enthusiasm not only never waned, but it is still nurtured to this very day by that burst of early-morning adrenaline. Four decades have gone by since. Malcolm Muggeridge once described as “a fearful thing” to contemplate the output of so many years of assiduous journalism.
Let us suppose an average daily stint of round about one thousand words. The total runs into millions. One has written the Bible and the Encyclopaedia Britannica many times over. Add to this the spoken words on radio and television and one reaches astronomical figures; a vast verbal outpouring, dealing, for the most part, with topics of no present relevance.
To further quote Mugger-idge, “The glory of journalism is its transience. Only the greatest bores imagine that their offerings reach beyond the next edition.” Thankfully enough, the average journalist takes a saner and more wholesome view. He or she knows that what is written exists only to be melted down and dispersed, like the metal on which it used to be stamped. Today’s papers are tomorrow’s rubbish-bin liners. Each night the same climax reached, with the same languid aftermath.
The electronic revolution will bring all that to an end. Those who have resisted it have obviously lost all hope. Those who joined it know only too well the reality it presents. I know authors and journalists who would not adapt and have more or less faded away, while many others who did now cannot even imagine how they ever coped before. Self-respecting newspapers today cannot be without their regularly updated on-line version which will, one day, become standard fodder, not necessarily in our lifetime.
Yet, at this moment in time in Malta, there seems to be this unnatural defiance of present-day realities. The number of newspapers published here is, per capita, probably one of the highest in the world. Both the quality and volume of presentation have improved considerably; not so, regrettably, the standard of writing in both Maltese and English. Newspapers have been started and soon had their sister publications, as if the local advertising cake was not already minutely sliced and almost ritually consumed.
This defiance is, of course, a source of much personal satisfaction. But how long can it last? As the pattern of public reading continues to change with the times, the day will come when the Maltese print media too will have to cut itself down to size. Malta is a top IT-conscious country, which is all the more reason to believe that the future holds many new challenges as well as many realities that will have to be accepted.
Until that woeful day, though, let us enjoy the variety and number of our newspapers. In so doing, however, bear in mind one very important fact – everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story, of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.